Knowledge Management (KM) is a concept and a term that emerged approximately two decades ago, approximately 1990. Quite simply it could be said that it means to organize the information and knowledge of an organization in a holistic way, but that sounds a bit woolly and Surprisingly, Although it sounds excessive, it is not the whole picture. Early in the GC movement, (Davenport, 1998) offered the still widely quoted definition:
"Knowledge management is the process of capture, distribution and effective use of knowledge."
This definition has the virtue of being simple, rigid and to the point. Some years later, the Gartner Group created another second definition of GC, perhaps the most cited (Duhon, 1998):
“Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identify, capture, evaluate, retrieve and share all the information assets of a company, such as databases, documents, policies, procedures, previously not captured experience and experience individual in workers ».
Both definitions share a very organizational, very corporate orientation. GC, historically at least, is primarily about knowledge management of and in organizations.
The operational origin of KM, as the term is understood today, arose within the consulting community and from there the KM principles were quickly spread by consulting organizations to other disciplines. Consulting firms quickly realized the potential of the Internet intranet to link their own geographically dispersed and knowledge-based organizations. Once they have gained experience in leveraging intranets to connect across their organizations and to share and manage information and knowledge, they then understood that the experience they had gained was a product that could be sold to other organizations. A new product, of course, needed a name, and the name chosen, or at least close in, was Knowledge Management.The moment was propitious, as the enthusiasm for intellectual capital in the 1980s had prepared the bomb for the recognition of information and knowledge as essential assets for any organization.
Perhaps the most central drive in QA is to capture and make available, so that it can be used by others in the organization, the information and knowledge that is in people's heads as if it were, and that has never been explicitly stated.
Another way to view and define CG is to describe this as the movement to replicate the information environment known to be conducive to successful R&D, deep and open communication and access to information, and to deploy it widely throughout the company. It is almost banal to observe now that we are in the post-industrial information age and that an increasing proportion of the working population is made up of information workers. The role of the researcher, considered the information worker par excellence, has been studied in depth with a focus on identifying environmental aspects that lead to successful research (Koenig, 1990), and the strongest relationship is by access to information, knowledge and communication.It stands to reason then to try to apply those same successful environmental aspects to knowledge workers in general, and that is what GC is actually trying to do.
Explicit, Implicit and Tacit Knowledge
In GC literature, knowledge is most commonly classified as explicit or tacit (what is in people's heads). However, this characterization is too simple, but a more important point, and a criticism, is that it is misleading. A much more nuanced and useful characterization is to describe knowledge as explicit, implicit, and tacit.
Explicit: information or knowledge that is presented in a tangible way.
Implicit: information or knowledge that is not expressed in tangible form but that could be made explicit.
Tacit: information or knowledge that one would have extreme operational difficulties establishing in a tangible way.
The classic example in GC literature of true 'tacit' knowledge is Nonaka and Takeuchi's example of kinesthetic knowledge that it was necessary to design and engineer a homemade bread maker, knowledge that could only be gained or transferred by having engineers working alongside Bakers and Learning the movements and the "sensation" necessary to knead the bread dough (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).
The danger of the explicit-tacit dichotomy is that when describing knowledge with only two categories, that is, explicit, what is presented in a tangible way, and tacit, what is within people, is that it becomes easy to think too simplistically In terms of explicit knowledge, which requires the 'compilation' of KM methodologies, and tacit knowledge, which requires 'connecting' KM methodologies and disregard that in many cases what is needed is to convert the implicit knowledge tacit in Explicit Knowledge, for example, post-action reports and briefings described below.
What is GC really about? What constitutes GC operationally?
So what does GC imply? The most obvious point is the organization's data and information being made available to members of the organization through portals and the use of content management systems. Content management, sometimes known as Enterprise Content Management, is the most immediate and obvious part of GC. For a great graphical snapshot of the content management domain, go to realstorygroup.com and check out their 2012 content technology provider map.
In addition to the obvious, however, there are three companies that are quintessential GC, and these are the foundation for most of what is described as GC.
(1) Lessons learned databases
Lessons learned databases are databases that attempt to capture and make accessible the knowledge that has been gained operationally and would not normally have been captured on a fixed medium (to use copyright terminology). In the CG context, the emphasis is typically on capturing the embedded knowledge in people and making it explicit. The concept or practice of the lessons learned is one that could be described as born by GC, since there is very little in the way of a direct antecedent. At the beginning of the GC movement, the phrase typically used was "best practice", but that phrase was soon replaced by "lessons learned."The reasons were that "lessons learned" was a broader and more inclusive term and because "best practices" seemed too restrictive and could be interpreted to mean that there was only one best practice in a situation. What might be a good practice in the American culture might not be a good practice in another culture. Large international consulting firms were well aware of this and led the movement to replace the new term. The "Best Practices" followed by "Lessons Learned" became the most common hallmark phrase of early GC development.Large international consulting firms were well aware of this and led the movement to replace the new term. The "Best Practices" followed by "Lessons Learned" became the most common hallmark phrase of early GC development.Large international consulting firms were well aware of this and led the movement to replace the new term. The "Best Practices" followed by "Lessons Learned" became the most common hallmark phrase of early GC development.
Nothing of course is brand new and without something that can be seen as a predecessor. One of those possible antecedents was the World War II report on pilots after a mission. The primary objective was to gather military intelligence, but a clear secondary purpose was to identify lessons learned, even if they were not named so, to pass them on to other pilots and instructors. Similarly, the United States Navy Submarine Service, after an embarrassing and lengthy torpedo fiasco that failed to properly detonate and an even more embarrassing failure to follow up on reports of consistent torpedo failures by sub-captains, instituted a system of »Intention to avoid any fiasco in the future.The captain's patrol reports were clearly designed to foster analytical information, with reasoned analyzes of the reasons for failure and success. It was emphasized that a key objective of the report was to make strategy recommendations for senior officers to reflect on tactics for other captains to take advantage of (McInerney & Koenig, 2011).
The military has become an avid proponent of the concept of lessons learned. The phrase the military uses is "After Action Reports." The concept is very simple: don't trust someone to make a report. There will almost always be too many things immediately demanding that person's attention after an action. There should be a system by which someone, typically someone in GC, is assigned the responsibility of reporting, separating the wheat from the chaff, creating the report, and then ensuring that the lessons learned are captured and disseminated.
The concept is not limited to the military. Prusak (2004) is of the opinion that in the corporate world the failure to implement GC number one is that so often the project team dissolves and team members are reassigned before any report or post-action report is collected. Organizations operating in a project team environment should pay close attention to this issue and establish a follow-up procedure with clearly delineated responsibility for its implementation.
A wonderfully instructive example of a "lesson learned" is told by Mark Mazzie, GC consultant (2003). The story stems from his experience in the QA department at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. Wyeth had recently introduced a new pharmaceutical agent primarily for pediatric use. They hoped it would be a substantial success because, unlike its predecessors, it needed to be administered only once a day, which would make it much easier for the caregiver to ensure that the child followed the medication regimen. Drug sales started well, but soon became disappointing. A sales representative (what the pharmaceutical industry used to call men of detail), however, discovered, chatting with his customers, the reason for the disappointing sales and discovered the solution.The problem was that the children strongly objected to the taste of the drug, and the caregivers informed the prescribing doctors that they couldn't keep their son from taking the drug. The solution was orange juice. A gulp of orange juice masked the offensive taste. If the sales representative enlightened the doctor that the therapy should be transmitted to the caregiver as the pill and a glass of orange juice taken simultaneously first thing in the morning, then there was no dissatisfaction and sales were fine.If the sales representative enlightened the doctor that the therapy should be transmitted to the caregiver as the pill and a glass of orange juice taken simultaneously first thing in the morning, then there was no dissatisfaction and sales were fine.If the sales representative enlightened the doctor that the therapy should be transmitted to the caregiver as the pill and a glass of orange juice taken simultaneously first thing in the morning, then there was no dissatisfaction and sales were fine.
Implementing a system of lessons learned is complex from both a political and an operational point of view. Many of the questions surrounding such a system are difficult to answer. Who decides what constitutes a lesson worth learning? Are employees free to undergo the system without being examined? Most of the successful experiences learned in implementation have concluded that this system needs to be monitored and that there must be an approval and approval mechanism before items are assembled as lessons learned. How long do the items stay in the system? Who decides when an item is no longer outgoing and timely? The most successful lesson learned systems have an active weeding or layering process.Without a clearly designed process for weeding, the ratio of crisp new items inevitably decreases, the system begins to look stale, and use and utility drop. Suppression, of course, is not necessarily loss and destruction. Using layering principles, elements removed from the foreground can be archived and moved to the background, but still available.
All of these questions must be carefully thought out and resolved, and the mechanisms designed and put in place before a system of lessons learned is launched. Inattention can easily lead to failure and less effort later.
- Experience Location
If knowledge resides in people, then one of the best ways to learn what an expert knows is to talk to that expert. Finding the right expert with the knowledge you need, however, can be a problem. The basic function of a specialized knowledge localization system is simple: it is to identify and locate people within an organization who have experience in a particular area. Such systems were commonly known as yellow page systems in the early days of GC. In recent years, the term experience locator or experience location has replaced the yellow pages as more precise.
Currently there are three areas that typically provide data for a specialized knowledge location system, employee resumes, identification of employees from areas of specialization, usually by request to fill out an online form, or by the algorithmic analysis of electronic communications by and for the employee. The latter approach is usually based on email traffic, but may include other electronic communications social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. Business packages to match questions to mastery are available. Most of them have load balancing schemes so as not to overload any particular expert. Typically,These systems classify the degree of presumed experience and will change a query for the experience ranking when the highest options seem to be overloaded. Such systems often also have a feature by which the requestor can mark the request as a priority, and the system will then attempt to match higher priority requests with a higher presumed (calculated) experience range.
- Communities of Practice (CoPs)
CoPs are groups of individuals with shared interests who meet in person or virtually to tell stories, to share and discuss problems and opportunities, discuss best practices, and discuss lessons learned (Wenger & Snyder, 1999). Communities of practice emphasize the social nature of learning within or between organizations. Conversations around the water cooler are often taken for granted, but in geographically distributed organizations the water cooler needs to be virtual. Similarly, organizations find that when workers quit a company office to work online from home or on the go, the exchange of natural knowledge that occurs in social spaces must be virtually replicated.In the context of KM, CoPs are generally understood to mean electronically linked communities. Electronic linking is not essential, of course, but since GC emerged in the community of consultants aware of the potential of Intranets to link geographically dispersed organizations, this orientation is understandable and inevitable.
The classic example of the deployment of CoPs is that of the World Bank. When James Wolfensohn became president in 1995, he focused on the role of the World Bank in disseminating development knowledge. To that end, it encouraged the development of CoPs. A CoPs could, for example, focus on building and maintaining roads in arid conditions, and the point would be to include not only participants from the World Bank and the country in which the relevant project was being implemented, but also participants from other locations who had experience building roads in arid conditions, such as staff from the Australian Road Research Board and the Arizona Department of Transportation.
Organizing and maintaining CoPs is not a simple or easy task. As Durham (2004) points out, there are several key roles to fill, which she describes as a manager, moderator, and thought leader. They do not necessarily have to be three separate people, but in some cases they will have to be. For a CoP some questions to think about are:
Who fills the different roles of: manager, moderator, and thought leader?
How is the CP managed?
Are the posts open or is someone reviewing or editing the posts?
How is the CoP kept fresh and vital?
When and how (under what rules) are articles removed?
How are these items archived?
Who reviews the CoP for the activity?
Who is looking for new members or suggesting that the CoP may have exceeded its usefulness?
The Stages of GC Development
Looking at GC historically through the stages of its development tells us not only about the history of GC, but it also reveals a lot about what constitutes GC.
First Stage of GC: Information Technology
The initial stage of GC was mainly driven by IT, information technology. This first stage has been described using an equestrian metaphor as "online from intellectual capital." The concept of intellectual capital provided the rationale, and the framework, seed and availability of the Internet provided the tool. As described above, the consulting community leapt to the new capabilities provided by the Internet, using it first for themselves, realizing that if they shared knowledge across their organization more effectively, they could avoid reinventing the wheel, sub-opening their competitors and make more profit. The first use of the term Knowledge Management in the new context seems to have been in McKinsey.They quickly realized they had a compelling new product. Ernst and Young organized the first GC conference in 1992 in Boston (Prusak, 2004). The highlight is that GC's first stage was on how to deploy that new technology to achieve more effective use of information and knowledge.
The first stage could be described as the "If only Texas Instruments knew what Texas Instruments knew" stage, to revise a widely quoted aphorism. The distinctive phrase of Stage 1 was first "best practices", to be replaced by more political "lessons learned".
Second Stage of GC: HR and Corporate Culture
The second stage of CG emerged when it became clear that simply deploying new technology was not enough to effectively enable information and knowledge sharing. The human and cultural dimensions had to be addressed. The second stage could be described as the stage "If you build it, they will come" is a fallacy ", the recognition that" if you build it they will come "is a recipe that can easily lead to rapid and embarrassing failure if the human factors are sufficiently taken into account.
It became clear that the implementation of the CG would imply changes in the corporate culture, in many cases quite significant changes. Consider the previous case of the new pediatric medicine and the discovery of the effectiveness of adding orange juice to the recipe. Pharmaceutical sales representatives are primarily compensated not by salary, but by bonuses based on sales results. What is there for the sales rep to share his new discovery when the most likely result is that his bonus would be substantially reduced next year? The changes in corporate culture necessary to facilitate and promote information and the exchange of knowledge can be important and profound. Thus,CG extends far beyond the simple structuring of information and knowledge and makes it more accessible.
As this recognition developed, two main themes from the business literature were introduced into the GC fold. The second was Nonaka's work on 'tacit' knowledge and how to discover and cultivate it (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). The Knowledge Creator Company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation.) Both were not just the human factors of GC implementation and use; It was also about knowledge creation as well as knowledge sharing and communication. The key phrase from Stage 2 was "communities of practice". A good indicator of the change from the first to the second stage of QA is that for the 1998 QA Conference Conference, there was for the first time a notable contingent of attendees From human resources, human resources, departments,And for the coming year, 1999, RH was the largest single group, displacing IT attendees from the top spot.
Third Stage of GC: Taxonomy and Content Management
The third stage was developed from the awareness of the importance of the content and, in particular, the importance of the recovery of the content and, therefore, the importance of the arrangement, description and structure of that content. Since a good alternative description for the second stage of GC is the "not good if you don't use it" stage, then in that sense, perhaps the best description for the new third stage is "not good if you try to use it but don't You can find it. "
Other QA issues
One issue is the need to maintain the knowledge of retirees. Of course, the fact that the baby boomer is now reaching retirement age is making this problem particularly salient. GC techniques are very relevant to this question. One technique is to apply the lessons learned idea-just treat the retiree's career as a long project that is coming to an end and create a report after the action, a massive data dump. This idea seems obvious, but only in special cases is it likely to be very useful.
Much more likely, it is useful to keep the retiree involved, keep them in the CoPs and find them through experience locating systems. The real utility is likely not to be found directly in the information the retiree leaves behind, but in the new knowledge created by the retiree's interaction with current employees. The retiree says "it occurs to me that…" and elicits an answer something like "yes, but here…", a discussion develops, the retiree contributes part of the necessary experience and generates a solution. The solution comes not directly from the retiree's knowledge, but rather from interaction.
Another important development is the expansion of GC beyond GC's 20th century vision of organizational insight as described in the Gartner Group's definition of KM. GC is increasingly seen as encompassing the entire bandwidth of information and knowledge that can be useful to an organization, including knowledge external to the organization, knowledge emanating from suppliers, vendors, customers, and knowledge originating from the scientific community and academic, The traditional domain of the library world. Seen in this light, GC extends to environmental scanning and competitive intelligence.
GC is here to stay?
The answer certainly seems to be yes. The most compelling analysis is the bibliometric one, simply by counting the number of articles in the business literature and comparing it to the enthusiasm of other businesses. Most business enthusiasms grow rapidly and peak after about five years, and then decline almost as quickly as they grew.
Bibliography
Davenport, TH (1998). Saving the soul: focused on man and information management. Harvard Business Review.
Durham, M. (2004). Three critical roles for knowledge management work areas. The American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Koenig. (1990). Information and productivity services downstream. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.
McInerney, C., & Koenig, ME (2011). Knowledge Management (GC) in Organizations: Theoretical and Practical Foundations. Morgan and Claypool.
Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press.
Prusak, L. (2004). Where does knowledge management come from? Knowledge Directions. Personal communication.
Wenger, EC, & Snyder, WM (1999). Communities of practice: The organizational frontier. Harvard Business Review.
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